I'm homesick. But I cannot go back to Syria. I lost everything. And I'm against the Syrian regime, so there is no way to go back. I'm really homesick.

When you have a goal to reach, you will be strong automatically. And you will be patient automatically. If you don't have a goal, your life will be a disaster. You will lose yourself and you will lose your soul.

Weakness is worse than cancer, I think. It's a kind of psychological or spiritual cancer. And if you have a goal in your life, you'll get psychological immunity. Psychological immunity is a kind of optimism, just like spring.

I'm writing a novel about the Syrian war. It will be completely different from my short stories. I have to address my feelings directly because I cannot avoid the war. It's something in my soul, in my blood.

There's a lot of sympathy, but some people in America don't care. They think Syria is a very faraway place and that it's none of their business.

I was afraid that something would happen to me. But at the same time I was lucky, because some writers were tortured and jailed. I always used metaphors that could be interpreted in more than one way. Maybe this style protected me.

Some people think that the Syrian people are from another planet. On the contrary, I think that we all live inside the same boat, on the same planet. And the Syrian war affects everybody now, the whole world. There are Syrian refugees everywhere now. But it looks like nobody cares about civilians in Syria. They are suffering. There are hundreds of victims - innocent women, children, and old men who are hurt or killed every day - and no one cares about them.